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AFP
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a professor at the University of Melbourne, has been in jail since September 2018.
A British-Australian woman serving a 10-year sentence in Iran for espionage has been transferred to a notorious desert prison, authorities say.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a professor at the University of Melbourne, has been in jail since September 2018.
She was tried in secret and flatly denies all the charges against her.
The Australian government said it holds Iran accountable for the “safety and well-being” of Ms. Moore-Gilbert and “urgently seeks access” to it.
“The Dr. Moore-Gilbert case is a top priority for the Australian government, including for our embassy officials in Tehran,” the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement on Tuesday.
The statement added that Iran had confirmed previous reports from human rights activists that it had been transferred to the famous Qarchak prison.
The prison is sometimes used as punishment for Iranian political prisoners, and the former inmates have described the conditions as abysmal.
What is Mrs. Moore-Gilbert’s situation?
Before being transferred to Qarchak prison, Ms Moore-Gilbert, a professor of Middle Eastern politics, had spent almost two years sleeping on a cell floor in Evin prison in the capital Tehran, according to a friend. .
She has been in solitary confinement and on several hunger strikes, and is said to have been beaten for trying to comfort new prisoners by passing notes and writing to them on prison walls.
On Tuesday, the husband of British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was jailed in Iran in 2016 on espionage charges he has always denied, said Qarchak was a place where “[Iranian] the authorities sent political prisoners to the women when they wanted to break them. “
“It is in the middle of the desert, without clean running water, very poor food with drugged bread and rice and gangs, so you can wait months to sleep,” said Richard Ratcliffe.
Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been on a hunger strike in solidarity with Ms. Moore-Gilbert.
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“Qarchak prison is where ordinary prisoners are found. It is crowded and some of them are dangerous,” said Hadi Ghaemi, director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran.
Referring to an earlier statement by Ms. Moore-Gilbert that she had rejected an offer of freedom in exchange for becoming a spy for Iran, she added: “They are not happy with their resistance and their refusal to cooperate.”
A family friend told BBC world affairs correspondent Caroline Hawley that Ms. Moore-Gilbert “feels abandoned.”
“The Australian government does not appear to have been very proactive: it has lacked the money it needs to buy basic provisions for itself in prison,” they said.
According to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Ambassador visited Ms. Moore-Gilbert in Evin Prison recently and had been in phone contact with her in recent months.
What did she say about her confinement?
Moore-Gilbert told an Iranian human rights activist in a phone call earlier this week that he had not spoken to his family for about a month.
Reza Khandan, the husband of imprisoned human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, said in a Facebook post that Ms. Moore-Gilbert was in “very bad shape.”
He wrote that she had said to him, “I cannot eat anything, I don’t know, I am very disappointed. I am very depressed.”
- Uncertain fate of jailed dual citizens of Iran
In letters smuggled out of Tehran’s Evin prison in January, the teacher said she “had never been a spy” and feared for her mental health. She said she had rejected an offer from Iran to become a spy.
“I am not a spy. I have never been a spy, and I have no interest in working for a spy organization in any country.”
He also said he feared that his health “had deteriorated significantly.”
“I think I am in the midst of a serious psychological problem,” she wrote, made worse by “the ban on making phone calls with my family.”
Ms. Moore-Gilbert is adamant that she is “an innocent woman … imprisoned for a crime I have not committed.”
The Cambridge-educated academic was traveling on an Australian passport and was detained at Tehran airport in 2018 while trying to leave after a conference.
Last year, British-Australian woman Jolie King and Australian boyfriend Mark Firkin were released after being jailed in Tehran for allegedly blowing up a drone without a permit.
